hack Pokemon Mystery Dungeon - Explorers of Alpha (2.0 Patch Notes, still under heavy development)

[Balthazar]

Decided to try out the demo until Quicksand Pit. And yeah, as expected, QoL, design, difficulty (played in Expert + SC) are exquisite.

As opposed to some other difficulty hacks, it seems dungeons are carefully crafted to provide an intelligent difficulty instead of outright kaizo. It's very enjoyable to find resources on the ground and having to use them creatively to survive. Mindless grind is eradicated from this hack. Those field effects are such a cool addition for bosses, I felt I was playing later games. Got caught off guard by Quicksand Pit's boss after recruiting great supports from the same dungeon, but managed to beat it deathless nonetheless

Random remarks:

- Not sure if it's an Expert-only thing, but it seems nothing in the dungeons prepare to the fixed rooms of Waterfall Cave and Apple Woods. I full cleared previous floors multiple times to be sure, but never found any items that would provide the basis for a strategy there. In my opinion orbs should drop somewhere, at least in Waterfall Cave, to not enter the realms of unfair difficulty at this level. Still passed them thanks to careful Manual mode positioning but yeah.

- Beach Cave (or another resupply dungeon), should have a floor chock-full of Max Elixirs. They definitely are the rarest resource, not having a Wynaut trade recipe. Nectar Forest could be repurposed as a sort of Drunkard Forest for example, with Nectars mixed with Max Elixirs.

- Porygon has a bug where one of the later ranks listing is accessible from the start (but not usable).

Anyways, anyone should play this hack. I think many kids dreamt of having this kind of experience back in the day. I surely did.

[Balthazar]

Pondering if I should continue my save or if the full version is so different that it would warrant a restart.

[PeterKart4444]

Is it only me that has the game crash on them in floor 8 of mt travail?

[Wark]

Don't know if someone has experienced the same bug...however, I'm playing 2.0 and the job bulletin board keeps showing me the same missions, over and over again.

Anyone knows if there's some way to fix this?

Anyways shoutout to Mond for its works, he took the PMD hacking stuff to a whole new level

[Flyingfox1221]

I recently discovered this amazing hack. Sadly, version 2.0 seems to have two issues on my end. First, like some other users experience, the job bulletins don't update at all. They show the same quests every day (the outlaw one has no quests).
Last issue is that the rom does not work in Drastic emulator. I had to switch to Lemuroid (retroarch core based on Desmune) to bypass the team naming crash.

 

I wish there was fix to the first issue. My brain has a re-obsession with EoS and I really looked forward to playing it with more features AFAIK, no other hack has level scaling, the feature I like most!

Edited March 8 by Flyingfox1221

[Balthazar]

By the way, does Level Scaling reshuffle enemy movesets to include higher level moves? Or it only upgrades stats? I'd assume not since I don't see enemies using more powerful moves than default, but wanted to make sure it's not a bug.

Or could it be that movesets are hardcoded per dungeon?

Edited March 9 by Balthazar

[Flyingfox1221]

Guys, after much digging, I found another version of 2.0 that does not have the bulletin bug. It still crashes when naming the team, but that can be circumvented by using Lemuroid. I hope it is okay to put the link here, since the creator put it in Discord: https://drive.google.com/file/d/12_K9Tf9H_mgFkBLT3nZ5JYN5_lOqLuHO/view

Don't use the patch in the root of the RAR file. Use the Delta patch in the inner folder (check the date; it's a newer version).

 

I hope this helps somebody. Discord is a mystery to me, so it was a little hard to find. That was how MUCH I wanted to try this romhack

Edited March 10 by Flyingfox1221

[Flyingfox1221]

On 3/7/2024 at 9:25 PM, Wark said:

Don't know if someone has experienced the same bug...however, I'm playing 2.0 and the job bulletin board keeps showing me the same missions, over and over again.

Anyone knows if there's some way to fix this?

Anyways shoutout to Mond for its works, he took the PMD hacking stuff to a whole new level

Check my comment above I found a fix!

[Alphadaemon]

  

On 1/5/2024 at 10:18 PM, Hermes P Mane said:

Hi! It's been many years since i last played Explorers of Sky and after finding your Explorers of Alpha i've really gotten in the mood to beat those dungeons all over again, especially in such a passionate project. Seems to be be an exceptional game and I'll be waiting for 2.0 to play, even though it may take a while.

Introductions made, I'd like to make a suggestion. As i read the game changes displayed in this post i noticed none were related to death penalties. As i remember, the original game took half of your money and itens whenever you died. This is mostly ok but it was infuriating to lose some majorly important itens so it'd be nice to customize whether you lose all items, half items, no items or just lose non-exclusive/unique items.

No losing penalty for Exclusive sounds fair, I'm gonna add it ! Thanks for the idea !

 

On 1/27/2024 at 12:37 PM, Gish said:

I recently downloaded the 2.0 version from https://hacknews.pmdcollab.org/hacks/pokemon-mystery-dungeon-explorers-of-alpha?lang=en, but when I tried running it on Drastic emulator for android, I couldn't get past the moment we sign up our team in Wigglytuff's Guild. When I tried running the same nds file on Desmume, it allowed me past that scene as per normal. Any help or advice?

Drastic seems to be 100% compatible in the next version so there's that.

 

On 2/23/2024 at 9:35 PM, Balthazar said:

Decided to try out the demo until Quicksand Pit. And yeah, as expected, QoL, design, difficulty (played in Expert + SC) are exquisite.

As opposed to some other difficulty hacks, it seems dungeons are carefully crafted to provide an intelligent difficulty instead of outright kaizo. It's very enjoyable to find resources on the ground and having to use them creatively to survive. Mindless grind is eradicated from this hack. Those field effects are such a cool addition for bosses, I felt I was playing later games. Got caught off guard by Quicksand Pit's boss after recruiting great supports from the same dungeon, but managed to beat it deathless nonetheless

Random remarks:

- Not sure if it's an Expert-only thing, but it seems nothing in the dungeons prepare to the fixed rooms of Waterfall Cave and Apple Woods. I full cleared previous floors multiple times to be sure, but never found any items that would provide the basis for a strategy there. In my opinion orbs should drop somewhere, at least in Waterfall Cave, to not enter the realms of unfair difficulty at this level. Still passed them thanks to careful Manual mode positioning but yeah.

- Beach Cave (or another resupply dungeon), should have a floor chock-full of Max Elixirs. They definitely are the rarest resource, not having a Wynaut trade recipe. Nectar Forest could be repurposed as a sort of Drunkard Forest for example, with Nectars mixed with Max Elixirs.

- Porygon has a bug where one of the later ranks listing is accessible from the start (but not usable).

Anyways, anyone should play this hack. I think many kids dreamt of having this kind of experience back in the day. I surely did.

Max Elixirs are Beach Cave floor 3 and have a 45% chance to spawn out of 3 to 6 items, which is enough I feel like. The resource is fairly accessible.
The Porygon bug is fixed in my version.
Waterfall Cave's even floors have a high density of orbs and you can use them floor 9. The Apple Woods floor however wasn't perfectly designed in the public version so I came up with a new design emphasing what I wanted people to do in the room along with a Pitfall Trap allowing to do to the previous floor in order to scout for the resource needed.
The full version has additions but most likely this won't affect your immediate experience pre-Aegis Cave.

 

On 3/6/2024 at 10:51 PM, PeterKart4444 said:

Is it only me that has the game crash on them in floor 8 of mt travail?

That's a fairly odd bug that was fixed in my version, however it's not addressed in the public one... Sorry about that...

 

On 3/9/2024 at 7:21 AM, Balthazar said:

By the way, does Level Scaling reshuffle enemy movesets to include higher level moves? Or it only upgrades stats? I'd assume not since I don't see enemies using more powerful moves than default, but wanted to make sure it's not a bug.

Or could it be that movesets are hardcoded per dungeon?

Level Scaling directly manipulates the entity level in the spawn list. That means the movesets are altered as a result. Some entities however have hardcoded movesets, for that it's case by case.

 

On 3/7/2024 at 9:25 PM, Wark said:

Don't know if someone has experienced the same bug...however, I'm playing 2.0 and the job bulletin board keeps showing me the same missions, over and over again.

Anyone knows if there's some way to fix this?

Anyways shoutout to Mond for its works, he took the PMD hacking stuff to a whole new level

As someone mentioned there's a public version that adresses the Job Bulletin Board issue.
Thanks for the kind words, however it's not just me haha! Without my testers and all the help I got from other modders, this project wouldn't exist! Teamwork makes the dream work!

Finally, I'll have you know that 2.0 is proceeding nicely. I tackled one of the biggest issues of Alpha and now that I'm done with it I'm clearing some stuff in my todolist yet again, though life prevents me from working faster, development is going well so far!

[Balthazar]

On 3/10/2024 at 8:44 PM, Alphadaemon said:

The full version has additions but most likely this won't affect your immediate experience pre-Aegis Cave.

The same applies for special episodes? I held off on them until now, but if some of them are 2.0 complete I will try them

[Balthazar]

Btw small "bug"/typo: when coming back from the future, Grovyle mentions that he got sent to Eastern Forest. Whereas iirc during the Time Gear search before/after Northern Desert, Eastern Forest was renamed, with the brownish coloring hinting that it will be playable (I think it was Flyaway Forest or something like that). So his mention of Eastern Forest should be renamed too.

Other small bug: after the stockade autosave, hero and partner get to keep the items they had equipped before entering the future. But I don't think they still have an effect, and need to be reequipped. Reporting it just in case it could cause problems elsewhere

Edit: *Trackless Forest. Found the subsequent mention

Edited March 14 by Balthazar

[Balthazar]

On 3/10/2024 at 8:44 PM, Alphadaemon said:

Level Scaling directly manipulates the entity level in the spawn list. That means the movesets are altered as a result. Some entities however have hardcoded movesets, for that it's case by case.

About level scaling: I'm at the Waterfall Cave return after the future. Enemies deal 1 dmg to me even with reduced defense and I one-shotted a Goldeen using regular attack for 55 damage. I'm level 53, so that shouldn't be hapenning, no? They also still have their oldie movesets, whereas I expected to be swarmed by some Hydro Pump and stuff.

Are you sure level scaling is not bugged in this version?

I will try disabling and reenabling it

Edit: Thoroughly exploring even floors, I haven't seen one orb at all btw. So maybe I'm on the wrong version. I downloaded it from the Google drive though, so it should be the right version.

Edited March 14 by Balthazar

[Balthazar]

Two-shotted Dialga lol. Yes, that's what I tought, Dialga. Yield before the unfathomable power of Violent Seed + Dig.

That was fun. Will reserve the postgame for full 2.0.